IBM Taps SSDs for Blades

IBM is looking to squeeze every bit of power out of its BladeCenter design by pairing it up with energy efficient solid-state drives.

The company recently chose the SanDisk SATA 5000, a 2.5-inch SSD for the BladeCenter HS21 XM server. The drive is said to cut up to 18 watts per blade, which translates to 252 watts per chassis and 1.512 watts per rack.

The drive also delivers a sustained read rate of 67 MB per second and a random read rate of 7,000 IOPS for a 512-byte transfer, all while providing an MTBF in the neighborhood of 2 million hours.